| Dilemma for Muslims
S.L. Jaki has written in Real View Books an
interesting work entitled “Jesus, Islam and Science”
in connection with reflections motivated by the terrorist
demolition of New York’s Twin Towers in September 11th,
2001. The final section entitles “Dilemma for Muslims”,
is reproduced below.
The Muslim world remained largely outside this development
until recent decades that witnessed the rise of new Muslim
national entities partly on grounds of former colonial possessions
of the West. While politically independent, the new Muslim
world rdm heavily dependent on Western technolo gical, scientific,
‘and economic power. Enormous is the task of turning
the Muslim fields and other geological riches into self sustaining
enterprises ran by Muslims alone and developed by them alone,
One of the difficulties is to educate a technologically and
scientifically trained vast cadre, a task entailing more problems
than meets the eye.
The deepest-going of those problems is that an educated class,
often much better trained than most of Muslim clergy, is clearly
reluctant to remain on a religious lash, which tries to control
the intellect even in matters non-religious. What the Muslim
world tried to avoid a thousand years ago, namely, to face
tip to the question of science and revelation, it no longer
can avoid. It may be that the fundamentalist wave sweeping
through. the Crescent has its source in the anxiety of the
Imams that Westernization, through science and technology,
will strike at the roots of the credibility of the Koran and
do this in a more trenchant way than the Christian message
of salvation in Jesus could ever do.
The strike will be felt mostly by Muslim minds trained in
the sci.ences who would reflect on the undeniable voluntarism
that characterizes God, the Creator, in the Koran Such a training
cannot help impose the view of physical processes consistently
valid across many orders of magnitudes. Suffice it to think
of the ability of science to explore interactions that had
taken place fifteen billion years ago. On pondering this vast
measure of consistency the Muslim scientist cannot help thinking
of the contents of sura 35, called “The Creator”.
It is not so much a discourse on the Creator and his work
as a warning against failling into idolatry. It contains a
comparison between the utter impotency of idols and the power
of God, between the prosperity of the devout and the ultimate
discomfiture of the evildoer. But in stressing the reliability
of faith in God, far greater emphasis is put on the often
witnessed failure of the idolators than on the reliable performance
of God’s great handiwork, nature. And the Muslim scientist
throw himself from the frying pan into the fire if, in order
to resolve the conflict between his faith and his reasoning;
he takes refuge in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics.
People have minds. Answers to nagging questions cannot forever
be postponed or dealt with in a facil manner. The same questions
will be asked about the Koran which literary criticism of
the Bible posed in the West a hundred years ago. Scientific
cosmology urgently demands a new look at the primitive world
view of the Koran, and to its insistence that the world was
created in four days. The education of women, the need to
fill jobs with women because there simply will not be enough
men to run a complex technological form of life, will raise
even further questions in Muslim minds about the extent to
which the Koran can be taken for a guide. Ever more frequent
encounters with Christians will raise questions in many Muslim
minds about the reliability of what the Koran says about Jesus,
the Church, and Christians Modem communication will make it
even more doubtful that large stretches of the Earth will
remain exclusively Muslim grounds Satellite television will
bring into the inner sanctum of family homes information which
the Muslim clergy will find ever more difficult to screen
In this process mo and more questions will be asked about
5 facts concerning Jesus and in the measure in which a Muslim
faithful takes seriously the Koran’s claim that Jesus
was a true faithful in the sense in which the Koran takes
that word. But on what, basis would one know what Jesus was,
said, and did? On the basis of the scant details given in
the Koran about him, or on the basis of sources immensely
more informative? In the least, questions will be legitimate
about the implications of the Koran’s firm assertions
that Jesus worked signal miracles. Indeed the Koran itself
prompts one to consider the question of whether it is not
impossible that Jesus, who receives so much honor, support;
and enlightenment in the form of Scriptures from God, can
teach anything but the right doctrine of pure monotheism.
The Koran’s reply is firm and once more ties the right
reply to its emphasis that Jesus was but man: “It beseemeth
not a man, that God should give him the Scriptures, and the
Wisdom, and the gift uf prophecy, and that then he should
say to his followers: Be ye worshipers of me as well as of
God’, but rather ‘Be ye perfect in things pertaining
to God, since you know the Scriptures, and have studied deep”
(3:72-73).
In view of the Koran’s witness to Muhamm extremely
poor information about the Jewish and Christian Scriptures,
the logic of the Koran’s foregoing state:ment should
seem to lie open to scrutiny. One cannot, of course, argue
with the mere claim that Muhammad received revelation. But
Jesus and other prophets before him also received revelation,
Moreover, they and especially Jesus, supported, unlike Muharnmad,their
claims H of speaking in God’s name with miracles. It
will then be rightly asked whether the Koran’s dicta
on Jesus correspond to facts, and whether the m.iracle assigned
to Jesus in the Gospel are not really the facts that should
decide the purpose for which they were performed. According
to the Gospels that purpose was to give credibility to trinitarian
monotheism. To reject this inference on the basis that trinitarian
belief is a slap on reason which cannot accept that three
is one and one is three, would be valid only of belief in
Trinity would be tantamount to equating three with one and
one with three, But in view of the enormous acumen invested
on the Christian side to dispose of that patently absurd presentation
of the dogma of Trinity and even of more serious objections
to it, the Christian is entitled to ask any honest Muslim
to reconsider his view of the Christian position.
Apart from questions of logic and conceptual nuances, the
Muslim. theologian may be expected to consider that the Christian
belief in Trinity is a respon.se to facts before it is a pondering
of questions of logic. For it is on the facts of the miracles
of Jesus, so different from their spurious rendering in the
Koran, and also on the psychological miracle of Jesus, which
immensely surpasses anything that can be said about Muhammad,
that Christians base their belief that Jesus spoke as befits
God and that therefore the Holy Spirit He promised was also
of the One divine Nature. Christian Trinitarian belief, which
has nothing to do either with Gnostic fantasies or with Hegelian
cogitations, is a belief riveted in facts, God’s miraculous
interventions, mainly through Christ, in history.
Those facts are not, of course, the facts of physical science,
but are facts nevertheless, and the very kind of facts on
the basis of which alone the facts of science can be justified
as facts. Now facts will prevail and even the Muslim world
cannot escape the logic that it is therefore the best to find
oneself on the side of facts. Facts are the soul of science
which the Muslim world, willy-nilly, must assimilate not so
much, as some terrorists think, for making possible a spectacular
destabilization of the Christian and post-Christian West,
as for the survival, for the feeding, and healthcare of the
Muslim East. Quite possibly, it will be under the impact of
the facfs: imposed by science that Islam will have to take
a serious look at fact, by far the greatest fact of human
history, or the fact which is Jesus, the anointed, the Messiah,
the Christ. This fact had from the earliest Chris Lion times
found in the figure of fish its hallowed symbol. The five
letters composing the creek work IXOYE (fish) respectively
begin five word that together stand for the deepest assertion
about Christ: Jest Christ God’s S Savior. May this become
true of the Muslim wcrld as well so that their dilemma may
serve their salvation.
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